Multiresolution Modeling Software

For those who are interested in actually simplifying data, I've
collected some links to available simplification software. I have not
used most of the software listed here. Even the ones I have used, I
have only toyed with. Consequently, I can't say much about the
relative quality of the software. However, I have tried to indicate
what basic algorithms they use.

Free Software

To one degree or another, the software packages in this section are
all free. They may have licenses with varying restrictions, but, to
the best of my knowledge, no licensing fees are required.

Program based on my SIGGRAPH 97 paper on
quadric error metrics. It
can produce high quality approximations of triangulated surfaces
quite rapidly. Source code and executables for various platforms
are provided.

These two programs are based on earlier work I did on the
approximation of height fields by triangulated surfaces. If you know
that your data is a height field sampled on a regular grid, this kind
of height field-specific algorithm can be much faster than more
general decimation algorithms.

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) provides much more than surface
simplification software. It is in fact a large and comprehensive
library of visualization-related code. However, of particular
interest here is the vtkDecimate filter which it
provides. This implements a version of the vertex decimation
algorithm described by Schroeder et al.